This dialogue purports to be an oral examination of a female student by two professorial types. The text refers to her as une étudiante, suggesting that she is a university student, rather than a high school student (une élève), but she seems quite young and naïve, so if she is in fact at university she must be only in the first year or so.

I do not know if an oral exam of this kind, centered on a particular passage in a particular literary work, would ever have taken place. The questions asked are of a sort I would associate rather with an explication de texte, a written exercise in which the student must provide context for and analysis of a short passage (such as a lyric poem, or a brief section of a longer prose work)—though this particular oral exam is far more scattershot than a proper explication de texte would be.

The passage the student is asked about comes from André Gide’s La Symphonie pastorale (1919), one of a number of shortish narrative texts by this author written in the first half of his career that are among his best-known and most widely-read works. It is presented as a journal written by Protestant minister in the Swiss Alps who has taken into his home a blind orphan girl (eventually named Gertrude); it details the process by which he endeavors to give her the first rudiments of understanding and then proceeds to open her up to the beauties of both the natural world and human culture.

The minister and his (grown-up) pupil Gertrude. Pierre Blanchard and Michèle Morgan in the 1946 film by Jean Delannoy (a fine example of the cinéma de qualité).

However, the education he provides skips over certain aspects of life, which he prefers for Gertrude to remain ignorant of, while the minister himself is from beginning to end blind to the true motivations of his apparently charitable acts. The consequences of this blindness, both willed and wilful, are disastrous, for Gertrude, the minister, and everybody else in the story.

The minister’s eyes are partly opened at the end of the film.

Tragic though the Symphonie pastorale is, the recording of this oral exam I find delightful, because of the amusing characterizations (the naïve but oh so enthusiastic examinee, the two diversely pompous examiners) and because of the fun it pokes at the French approach to literary studies (at least as they once were). The eager but deferential manner of the student (Oui, Monsieur! Non, Monsieur!) recalls to me the hapless pupil in Eugène Ionesco’s La Leçon.

Fumbles

In ordinary speech, we don’t always express ourselves perfectly smoothly. The characters in this dialogue are on their best linguistic behavior, but still they occasionally fumble (or the actors do), at which times they invariably catch themselves at it, halt, and begin over again. Here is where they do so:

French-speakers sometimes change their minds about what noun they are going to use in the middle of an enunciation, and if that change involves a different gender, they may have to make other changes as well.

In the first place, the student changes to a masculine noun, sens, and so has to change the gender of the definite article that precedes it. For the rest, the structure of the sentence is very loose, which is something that can happen in spoken French.

Quel en est l’auteur? – Note the interrogative form quel used rather than qui; for the significance of the latter form see the translation below.

The en is of course the pronominal adverb en. On its use here see this Language Topic.

Etudiante. C’est un pasteur protestant.

C’est un pasteur protestant. —In the translation below, I regularly translate pasteur as “minister,” that being more familiar to Americans as the word for a Protestant clergyman. At one point, however, I switch and translate it as “pastor,” when its similarity to the adjective pastoral is in question.

le pasteur lui dem— lui pose— lui demande des conseils — The examinee is here troubled by a distinction in French that is likely to pose a problem for English-speakers as well. In French, the verb to use with direct object question is poser:

poser une question = “to ask a question”

…but to ask for any particular piece of information, you have to use demander, the verb you also use to ask for an object:

Student. Gertrude is the heroine of The Pastoral Symphony. She is a young blind person. In the passage here she is rather presented as a sort of monster. She doesn’t see, she doesn’t hear, she doesn’t speak, she doesn’t move…

Student. Oh, on the contrary, she does. Only… her parents have been dead a long time, and the mo— the old grandmother, who was the only relative she had left, has also passed on. So now she is on her own, as a matter of fact, she’s an orphan.

Student. He gets involved because the minister asks hi— requests— asks his advice. As it happens, the minister has gotten nothing from Gertrude in spite of his efforts, and… the doctor explains to him, helps him out and explains to him that he should be much more patient.

Man. That’s perfectly all right, Miss, you’re not obliged to know everything. Tell me, now: you have said that this work was written in 1919. Can you tell us what was happening in France at this time, more or less?